Is Agentys a Good HEY Alternative? An Honest 2026 Verdict
· Sovattha Sok
Is Agentys a good HEY alternative? Honest 2026 verdict: HEY ($99/yr individual, $12/user/mo for Work) is an opinionated email service with a Screener and a mandatory @hey.com migration; Agentys ($16.99/mo) drafts replies automatically on your existing Gmail or Outlook — no new address. HEY controls inbound but writes nothing; if writing replies is your bottleneck, Agentys is the upgrade.
HEY (by 37signals) is an opinionated email service — the Screener, the Imbox, and a mandatory @hey.com address that means migrating off Gmail or Outlook. Agentys is automatic drafting on the account you already use, with no new address and no migration. HEY organizes who reaches you but writes nothing; when writing the replies is your real bottleneck, Agentys is the upgrade.
When Agentys is the right alternative: composition is the bottleneck
Here is the profile Agentys was built for. Inbound control is not your pain — you do not need a Screener, and you are fine with the address you have — but your mornings still drain into a queue of messages that each demand a real, considered reply: client questions, vendor back-and-forth, internal approvals, recruiter threads. HEY would help you organize that queue and decide who is allowed into it, but it would not write a single reply for you. That is the gap Agentys exists to close, and it is a different gap from the one HEY addresses.
Agentys connects to your inbox automatically, reads each new message in full, maps the thread's context, and references your sent history to learn how you actually write to each contact — your greeting for a given person, your sign-off, your sentence length, your level of formality. Then it generates draft replies: finished, multi-paragraph prose calibrated to that sender and that topic, not a blank template. You open the same Gmail or Outlook you have always used and the messages that need a response already have a draft sitting in them. Your job shifts from composing to reviewing: read, tweak a sentence if needed, approve, send. A loop that used to take 45 to 90 minutes of writing collapses to 10 to 15 minutes of editing. Agentys users report reclaiming around 1h47 of active composition time per day — roughly 35 hours across a 20-day working month.
The reason the work happens automatically in the background ties back to interruption cost: each time you stop to write a reply, getting back into focused work eats far more time than the reply itself. HEY reduces interruptions by controlling who gets into your inbox at all — a real and worthwhile thing. Agentys removes a different interruption entirely: because the drafting is finished before you sit down, you never break a focus block to wrestle with a reply. That is the practical meaning of "alternative" here. You are not swapping one inbox philosophy for another. You are deciding whether your scarce resource is inbound control (HEY's domain) or composition time (Agentys's), and routing your money to whichever one is actually bleeding.
The pricing math, side by side
The honest read of these numbers is not "one is cheaper." HEY for You at $99/year works out to about $8.25/month — less than half of Agentys Starter at $16.99/month. But they are not the same product: HEY sells inbound control and a calmer inbox, while Agentys sells the drafting that clears your reply load. The per-month sticker is the wrong place to start — match the spend to the bottleneck, not the smaller number.
Where the math favors Agentys is the time-value case. If you bill at $60/hour and Agentys reclaims even an hour a day of composition, the $16.99 subscription pays for itself before lunch on the first business day of the month. HEY reorganizes who reaches you, but it hands back zero hours of writing. For the specific job of getting replies written, $99/year of HEY buys you zero drafts, and Agentys is the one that does that work. Match the spend to the bottleneck, not to the smaller annual figure.